I used to work in County Government in Northern California. In effort to cut costs, an IT contract was signed and the IT work was outsourced to a company in Texas. The outsourced company still hired people locally for the most part, but executives lived elsewhere. At some point, as another cost-cutting measure for the contractor, the Helpdesk functions that were provided by people within the IT department were also outsourced. Then, when a person in department-land had an IT question, the question no longer ended up ringing a Helpdesk Technician within the County, but rang to the East Coast in some parts of the day - other times of the day, the phone was answered by a person in India. Typically, within an organization, people seek to find better ways to do things. When the same problem occurs repeatedly, people find workarounds, and often can even resolve the root issue, thus preventing that type of issue from occurring again. However, when solutions are outsourced, so is the learning. Outsourced support does not have the same incentives to seek root causes. The more they are relied upon, the better. More calls equals more pay, or at least more of the number-of-calls metrics that are used to justify their existence in the first place. Be cautious of outsourcing work that could readily be done in-house.